ATI has had a poor track-record when it comes to Linux support. There are too many stories about black screens, hours of configuring X, installing drivers, angrily (and ineffectively) editing configuration files, and sitting dumbfounded in front of the computer.

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AMD has traditionally been a bit more Linux-friendly, so after AMD bought ATI, a slight hope has arisen that in the future there might be better drivers for ATI-cards on Linux.

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However, creating better drivers takes some time, so while the people at AMD are doing their thing, people with ATI cards basically have these options:

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# Use the open source drivers. These are stable and nice, but currently they have poor 3D-performance, if any. If that's not a problem, they are the Right Choice&trade;.

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# Use the restricted-driver management system that comes with Ubuntu to install the drivers (envy/jockey/"restricted" packages).

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# Install the proprietary drivers as made available by AMD.

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# Install the drivers manually. This should be your last resort, and may not even work.

Installation Guide for Ubuntu Intrepid (v 8.10)

Now I'm like, well duh! Truly thafknul for your help.

Installing the restricted drivers "the Ubuntu way"

Restricted Drivers Manager

For most users it won't be necessary to go into installation and configuration details of the driver. Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid) provides a notification saying that there are restricted drivers available. You just have to go there (Restricted Drivers Manager) and enable the "ATI accelerated graphics driver". Ubuntu will then install and configure the driver for you.

Post-Installation Tweaks

To enable hardware accelerated video on pre-R500 cards, edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf to include the following lines without [...]

Installing the proprietary drivers "the ATI way"

Download the Cataylst 15.12 AMD driver file and run the installer. People that have not had luck with the first two choices have had success with this.

Note: A number of cards, some of which were marketed quite recently, are currently in ATI's legacy pipeline. Download the final version of the drivers (9.3) for these cards here [1].

Alright alright alright that's exactly what I nedeed!

Issues

Mesa drivers

If fglrxinfo reports that Indirect rendering by Mesa is in place, even though you have installed ATI driver, you might want to remove Mesa:

Remove the package xserver-xgl.

sudo apt-get remove xserver-xgl

Explanation: If you installed this previously in order to make compiz work, it will not allow direct rendering on your display. You can check out if this is what it causing the problem by running

DISPLAY=:0 glxinfo | grep render

If it returns an ATI renderer, it means that xgl is being displayed indirectly on the display 1. (Taken from [2])

Warning: This might make your compiz stop working as it is configured to use XGL. A solution might be to run the Envy script in order to configure compiz. Or, if Compiz stopped working due to "Composite" problem, check that the following is set in the /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection

Check for AGP and DRI errors in /var/log/Xorg.0.log like these are:

(EE) fglrx(0): [agp] unable to acquire AGP, error -1023

(EE) fglrx(0): cannot init AGP

(EE) fglrx(0): atiddxDriScreenInit failed, GPS not been initialized.

(WW) fglrx(0): * DRI initialization failed! *

If you have Intel 8285P and E7205 chipsets and AGP not detected then you have to remove the i82875p_edac module and restart a some others:

Hang at logout

If you experience hangs when logging out (of X) it is probably due to the /etc/ati/authatieventsd.sh script looking for X authorisation files in the wrong place when it starts up. You can kill the hanging authatieventsd.sh processes from a console tty to allow the shutdown of the X server. This can be fixed permanently with:

(intrepid is to be replaced by the name used at the building stage (hardy,8.10,8.04,etc...)

sudo chmod +x /etc/ati/authatieventsd.sh

just reboot login and ctrl+alt+backspace to try

Suspend/Hibernation

Suspend hibernation works with the latest driver.

For ATI X1400, to get the laptop to wake up from suspend, I had to change the following in /etc/default/acpi-support:

SAVE_VBE_STATE=false
POST_VIDEO=false
ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE=false

Comment: This is a little surprising, since the comments at the beginning of /etc/default/acpi-support seem to make it quite clear that those settings are ignored unless you add "acpi-support" to SUSPEND_METHODS. --Bewst 23:22, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

For Radeon 3200, to wake up from suspend, I had to add the following lines to /etc/X11/xorg.conf:
(This settings is not good option, if you are using compiz-fusion or any other transparency-based thingie. Not working for HD 3850)

A second Radeon 3200 suspend/wake issue seems to be related to the mouse/keyboard itself. Adding a reset to the kernel line of your grub configuration seems to solve this. In other words, update /boot/grub/menu.lst and add an i8042.reset:

AMD Control Center

You can start the AMD Control Center by typing:

Terminal Command

amdcccle

If amdcccle doesn't work and says Identifier is not a valid word, this may be caused by some of the reasons below:
- Use lower case letter in xorg.conf.
- Make sure lines have no hard returns in them causing some parameters without their corresponding keywords are misinterpreted
- If amdcccle complains about some keyword in your xorg.conf and quits with a segmentation fault, you may just be working with a different xorg.conf than your system uses. I had a copy of some generic xorg.conf in my home directory, and amdcccle complained about stuff it couldn't cope with. You need to start amdcccle in your /etc/X11 directory.